More details on Final Fantasy XIII-2, Square Enix’s sequel to the controversial Final Fantasy XIII, have emerged by way of a short trailer – which some have interpreted as having the towns and perhaps even non-linear segments so absent from the original.

I think Dragon Quest VIII was the last really old school JRPG produced by Square Enix that I have played. I had to put in well over 100 hours to finish it and it had very few cut scenes. One of few games recently (2006?)produced where you could lose a "boss" battle even though your were leveled up pretty well.

Nothing wrong with FFXII looking like an MMO. What matters is that there is a hella lot more to do in FFXII than FFXIII. The only thing bad about it was that it didn't expand enough on the story. Some people would complain about how the world is too vast, but I believe it's the same group of people who didn't play it at all because you can teleport to places in FFXII using teleporting(orange-color) save points.

XIII sucks both in gameplay options AND story. Long, boring 'tunnel' with next to nothing else to do outside battles, smothered in convoluted piece of shit for storyline.

It's like S-E was trolling comments from XII. They basically took all that was missing from XII and smother XIII with it(cutscenes), while taking away everything else that made XII good(gameplay options). This is wrong, because the point of making games in the same series is to improve on what's already there, NOT TO TAKE AWAY WHAT'S GOOD AND PUT SHIT IN ITS PLACE. Yet fanboy faggots of XIII insist that it was an 'evolution'. Apparently they mistaken that for 'devolution'.

random battles in d&d though could be fun and relatively easy. but we are talking about a table top rpg and a video game, thank god random battles are mostly done away with. i love being able to see the encounter, or at least AN encounter, instead of out of no where... monsters.

it adds to a game because in low health situatuions you can sneak ahead or run away based on should you head back or is their a save sopt close by you want to hit up

I also miss random battles. The idea for random battles came from dungeons and dragons, and they ran with it. I like dungeons and dragons. What was wrong with random battles? What was wrong with the take a turn combat system for that matter? I can tell you I hated FF 13's system because for the first 4 hours I was just sitting there mashing the fuck out of the x button. I quit FF 13 around 16 hours in too.

Btw, FF6 is my ideal Final Fantasy. Its linear up through until you get to the floating continent, and then you can make choices that really do affect the game. Wait for shadow or leave him. Then, world of ruin, you have a choice of how you go looking for your friends. Its a real godamn RPG.

And one last thing, I'm already unimpressed with the graphics I saw in that trailer. They look somewhat similir to FF 13, but, and this is a big one, how come the sand looks like they took brown and just used the paint programs fill in tool?

but of course, just in some games you play an epic hero exploring the world and fighting off villains and such. And in other games you play a bunch of annoying people running down a hallway for 20+ hours...

you can argue that... at the same time i would say that uncharted made me care more about its characters than most jrpgs can do at this time, and they can also make me more immersed in the character than jrpgs, because the main character isnt a self doubting twat that has to be dragged kicking and screaming through the plot.

also, good rpgs never force a character on you, you make the character yourself. now in video games, this inst fully possible yet, but there have been more than a few games in the past where you play a hero with no past and fight till you beat the main boss, WITH story along the way, im not talking about nes old where that was the game, i mean a story rich world with a blank shell you as a main character you play as and do good with.

in most jrpgs, you have no real say on what stats get focused on when you level, leveling just happens, in most jrpgs you also dont have a choice in what armor and weapons you use, as you are tied to once class and the weapons get progressively better, there is no this blunt weapons is more powerful than this sword, but slower, where you define your character through the choices in what weapons you want to use.

and in that sense, uncharted is more of an rpg than jrpgs, because you get a character, with a back story, who isn't a sniveling cunt, which you control and play as you want to. you want to use a pistol the whole game, a shot gun, an assault riffle, or take the enemies all down with melee, all those answers are right, the same is almost true with assassins creed but its probably a better example because of the pseudo leveling systems.

I dislike what you call "rpgs", I like when they have engaging story and characters that have personality; main characters in wrpgs are 90% faceless, and always having little actual storyine actions that define the character (I understand the feeling of being you, its just that if I wanted that, I'd be playing a tabletop rpg).

Also, in videogames the jrpgs you despise so, were the ones who created the genre (for the vg world) so don't go lowering them

over time they evolved away from rpgs, and became a game where you watch a story and level up

after that, some (square enix) are trying to evolve the stats out of an rpg without giveing it a branching story at all

jrpgs are on the verge of becoming just a 40 hour movie (13 was the first experiment in this) with road blocks in the way between movies (a level grind, or a pain in the ass boss)

i REALLY hope that jrpg turns around, because i love the anime art style, and fantasy worlds they create, but hate game play of many recent ones. and i hate the setting for most western rpgs (lol war, ho hero it up now) but the game play is SO much more satisfying where everything actually matters.

that's why they are called jrpgs. Imo, your view of rpgs is more inclined towards the western side, games such as Dragon Age, The Witcher, Baldur's Gate etc

JRPGS are totally different though, and when the thread title says 'May Be An RPG', it probably refers to RPGS like the old Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Golden Sun etc. Since it originates from a japan source, i am positive this is what their 'May Be An RPG' be referring to

one would be what i said above, where you get choice, shape the world by your choices, and so on.

another is stats. heavy, meaningful stats. where gaining every point is an achievement and an advancement in some way. however in recent years, the more rpgy games from japan have streamlined leveling, taking away stat goodness, while giving nothing of my previous deffinition.

take a look at disgaea games. thats the kind of stats i'm talking about. where you have levels, you have hidden levels (reincarnation), your weapons have levels, and everything you do can modify stat advancement in some way shape or form.

So if they were 'too much work' for FFXIII, how did they suddenly become able to do it here(assuming this trailer wants to suggest that anyway)? I smelt bullshit back then and I'm still smelling it now.

I'm not exaggerating to say that I became traumatized with XIII, XIV and 3rd Birthday so these days, I have one simple rule when it comes to buying anything with Square_Enix logo on it:

If the game has a lot of Motomu Toriyama's involvement in it, that would make it automatically binary-coded feces.

Sadly, Wada being a useless shell of a CEO that he is, still saw it fit for him to stay.

They should have just licensed an existing engine then, IF that was the real reason. They certainly did not have any problem licensing Unreal Engine for a couple of their RPGs. Thou they did not utilize it properly.

"They were 'too much work' for FFXIII" because they had to devote resources to creating Crystal Tools (originally called White Engine) for the PS3, develop a brand-new battle system, etc. Now that a lot of the work is done, and probably more importantly, now that they have the experience of having built a Final Fantasy game for the PS3, they can allocate more development resources to towns, side games, etc. Makes perfect sense to me.

With RPG's the battle system should be good from the tutorial not after a day and a half of wallowing through a sludge combat system. A main objective combat system is to make it so players want to keep fighting. Saying play the fucking game for 20 hours then you can have FUN is fucking bullshit.

I admit the battle system was pretty brainless for the first 20 to 30 hours or so. But once you start dealing with the likes of the Adamantoise, AFTER you finish the game, it does get interesting. So yeah, the system is unbalanced. But with a little tweaking of the levels, XIII-2's battle system could be really entertaining with little effort on the part of Square Enix.

To be honest, the lack of towns wasn't really a big deal imo. If you played the game you should have noticed that its basically a really long adventure with almost no "breaks".

Also, the way the game was set up, you NEVER had to buy any weapons or items, and almost never had to buy any accessories. The only thing you really ever bought from shops were upgrade materials. Yea they could have added towns if you really wanted to just talk to random people, but of the conventional town goodies (shops, inns, save point, talk to get next quest info) none were needed in the game with the way it was structured. The lack of towns didn't bother me at all.

Now the convoluted plot, and unlikable characters (cough*snow*cough) are a completely different story.

Just because it was 'ooh super duper complicated engine', consumers have to put up with that shit? Crystal Tools was supposed to be a game engine that was going to be used on a lot of games, not only FFs. In which case, why can't they develop it seperately? Why include the engine's creation in FFXIII's progress? So they would have an excuse to half-ass it because 'we don't have much time'? That means that the time they could have spent on FFXII could have been only 60% from those 5 years. Even much less if you consider the transition they had to make from its original PS2 code to PS3, which is STUPID because they should've let it stick to PS2.

When Capcom started developing MT Framework for RE5, they didn't announce anything about there being a new RE. They told us about RE5 only when they actually do work on RE5, not on the engine that will run it.

S-E made stupid decisions and used stupid excuses to make up for it, and fanboys just continue to take it in the ass. Fucking faggots.

Alas, we morn for the good ol' days when taking turn battles, logical characters, and vast lushes of land exploration was possible. Right now it seems as if FF is trying to keep up in terms of "graphics," as most other well known companies we know of are doing as well. *rolls eyes* Only Aqua can stop Snow. Just as learning from a past game-design flaw is supposed to make a product fixed -- where's the old battle system?

Being FF, nothing wrong with changing gameplay. They've been doing that for nearly every title. Even though ATB stuck for some time, how you develop your characters are different(Materia System, GF Skills, Crystals, Sphere Grid, etc).

The thing is, they took out SO MANY things that FF has been gradually adding to their sequels until IX. When X came out for the PS2 and took the world map away, I wasn't so assbitten since they were still trying to get used to animation CGs complete with voices, and the story's decent. Towns felt a bit smaller, but they were there along with all the secrets hiding behind it. Almost all NPCs get voices too. Also, Blitzball was good enough that Gamefaqs had a split board dedicated to that minigame alone.

XIII is just crap. I find it difficult to fathom those motherfuckers who claim that XIII's battles are 'great' when you only control one character and the rest are at full mercy of the goddamn AI. Outside battles, it's like you're just pushing the fast-forward button through a fucking tube, and there was nothing to interact with. These are why I disagree when people say XIII 'has at least great gameplay' when IT DOESN'T.

It's not necessarily bad, just different. Think about a lot of the turn-based games, you can get by by spamming the "accept" button and just spamming melee attacks; complex strategy often doesn't come into the very end. FF XII eschewed that for a system where combat within a role was very streamlined, but the skill came in setting up your paradigms and switching in the right situation.

It replaced spamming attacks and winning with letting the game spam attacks for you while you switch roles.

I actually enjoyed the combat. It's not necessarily any better or worse than previous FF games, it's just different. Same with the linear progress and lack of towns. Towns and more freedom is certainly fun, but I disagree that it must be present.

If you don't like the combat, that's fine. But that doesn't mean that anyone who did like it is a "motherfucker". Everyone's entitled to their opinion.

And by the way: Blitzball met just as much hate as it did love. I personally found it tedious, slow, boring, and time-consuming.

yea, we could see it coming, but how many people REALLY believed everything bad we were hearing, and not just assuming it all to be fiction and taken out of context?

i mean that until official strategy guide pictures were leaked, did you believe the game was basically a straight line, or did you think it was over exaggerated?

when i am genuinely excited for a game i try to go into a media black out, so nothing gets spoiled, and i just try to hear when the game will be out. so there is a good chance that many of the preorders couldn't cancel because they just didn't know at all. and in america, ff is one of those games that people get like a madden game, but with a bigger preorder base. these arent the kind of people who read the gaming blogs, these are the kind of people who generally just get a few games a year. they had very little idea how... straight of a game it was, or knew about all the criticism the game was receiving,

Well, bud... I'd believe you if you were a Japanese who got them first. Indeed many Japs weren't aware of it, and you can see them vent their frustrations in gaming blogs like jin115.com.

But the rest of us... WE HAD BEEN TOLD WHAT WAS IN STORE FOR US SINCE WE HAD MONTHS BETWEEN JAPANESE AND N.A. RELEASE. But nooooo~ "You don't have the right to complain until you actually played it". Well, if you bought into that shit FF faggots were feeding ya back then, you're just blind.

The game was out Dec. 2010 in jp, Spring 2011 rest of the world.
A preorder of goods due to in over 3 months and not bothering much with the news isn't really that unusual...

So, I tried enjoying the linear story of XIII, but leaving out Japanese audio and additionally translating "役め" which makes perfect sense, and explains the story, with a vague "focus" which doesn't make any and leaves you wondering WTF is going on, pissed me off enough to never buy anything rectangular again.

The only right thing they could do to save future customers would be to give players 90% rebate on FFXIII-2 if they send in a copy of FFXIII...
(that is, IF FF-XIII is actually a game...)